


not coming home tonight

by pumpkinless



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Depression, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, desert fic, post-Kerberos disappearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 21:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14702238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinless/pseuds/pumpkinless
Summary: Shiro is there until he isn't anymore, and then all Keith has is the desert.





	not coming home tonight

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as a tiny tumblr ficlet for an anon prompt and i couldn't quite get it out of my head
> 
> warnings for not-super-healthy use of alcohol & some contemplation of death

365

 

Keith didn’t mean to get so drunk tonight. He didn’t. It’s not—Shiro wouldn’t want to see him like this, slumped over in a poorly lit parking lot because he’s too wasted to figure out how to turn the key in the hoverbike. Shiro’s stupid, weird, hoverbike with the top of the line wheels and the vintage key starter, hand painted cherry red because she’s a beautiful lady who loves a piece of antique machinery. That’s what Shiro said about her (always _her_ ) when Keith asked.

He loves— _loved_ this ridiculous thing. She was this idiotic, spur of the moment purchase. It was just after graduation; Shiro was high on a job offer from the Garrison and shelled out way too much money for a fixer upper bike and top-of-the-line spare parts so he could spend the summer with a wrench in his hand and wearing a grease-stained tank top while Keith watched him make the bike beautiful again. Practice, Shiro said, good resume builder. He said other things, all his shit about patience and focus, but Keith was too busy eyeballing the flex of his biceps and the lines on his stomach when Shiro pulled the hem of the tank top up to wipe at his forehead. The most ridiculous man.

Clutching at his hair with both hands, Keith tries to breathe through the sense memory of that final summer. He tries so hard.

But instead, there’s snot in his nose, tears sliding down his face, and all he can do is gape at the cracked pavement between his scuffed boots. His lips curl away from his teeth as he tries to scream, tries just to get it all out, but it just makes his muscles strain and his throat burn like there’s a lit match inside him, about to catch the fuse and send the pain inside him exploding up into the sky.

Keith is drunk. He knows that, knows it’s because—because—

How pathetic is he that he’s breaking down here, all alone and unloved by the whole fucking world, and he can’t even say it to himself?

Shiro wouldn’t want to see him like this.

Shiro would—he would haul Keith up and slip one arm under Keith’s armpit to half carry him into the backseat of a cab, tossing a sober friend his keys and asking them to drive it back for him. He’d let Keith drool on his shoulder and absently pet his stomach the whole ride to the Garrison. When they arrived, Shiro would make Keith drink a glass of water and leave painkillers on his bedside table for the hellish morning to come.

And maybe—maybe this night, he would do something different, out of the ordinary, like smooth Keith’s hair back from his forehead and press a slow, soft kiss there, something to lull Keith into sleep while Shiro slipped out of the room. Or maybe he would stay, because Keith finally told him, and by some kind of miracle, Shiro also—

Well. Maybe, he might have said—

Keith’s voice comes back in the weakest, most pitiful whimper anyone has ever heard.

He clutches at the dog tags around his neck, evidence of the last crime he committed, after the formal hearing, but before the Garrison could kick him to the curb. The raised letters he knows by heart, the way they feel against his thumb when he rubs them for luck or support or comfort, and the way they feel against his lips when he imagines that this never happened to either of them.

One year, the newscaster on the diner’s TV said. One year.

Keith can’t believe he forgot.

 

3

 

The rage is the most potent feeling Keith has ever known.

It shocks him out of his numbness, out of the blank, crawling sickness that ties his limbs down and makes his stomach turn over and over and over again. In a sea of gray, Keith sees red. He sees so much red that when his hand starts stinging and arms are hauling him back off a body and people are shouting in horror, he doesn’t know what he’s done. How badly he’s fucked up.

But the red isn’t blood splashed across his vision, and Keith never knew that seeing red was a real emotion, a real kind of anger.

His knuckles bruise from the force. Iverson’s nose drips blood and something is wrong with his eye, but then Keith is manhandled away as three officers help their Commander up from the floor.

Iverson yells, “Pack your _fucking_ bags, cadet, you’re done.” Like Keith and everybody else in this hallway didn’t know that.

 _I didn’t mean to_ , Keith thinks, except he did. And when he replays those words over again in his brain, he can’t fault himself for the reaction. To say—to even _suggest_ that—and about Shiro. Shiro, who died for this fucking useless excuse for a space flight program, alone and scared and so far away from home. Just thinking this makes Keith’s vision cloud over again.

They lock Keith in some sort of meeting room. He thought they would take him to his dorm room, but it makes sense not to. They can’t stick his poor roommate in with a crazy person losing it and attacking officers in the hallway. It might make the Garrison look like they don’t care about their own people—the alive ones, at least.

So he throws himself in a chair, puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and tells himself he doesn’t need to cry.

But he cries anyway. At this point, it’s all he can do.

 

366

 

He sits in that parking lot until morning. He doesn’t sleep, but he isn’t lucid.

Now it’s one year and one day.

That’s the only thing he can think—that, and the reason he spent the night drunk on his ass in a parking lot is he punched some asshole cadet with a big mouth who said he was gonna be the first _successful_ pilot at the Garrison. The bouncer kicked Keith out on his ass, and Keith doesn’t even remember what the cadet looked like. It doesn’t matter. Seems that a year isn’t enough to get him to grow out of wanting to punch people who make him angry.

Keith tries so hard to keep living, these days. He knows Shiro would want him to. But it’s so difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

He doesn’t say this lightly: Shiro is the love of his life. And now the love of his life is frozen forever on a tiny, football shaped moon out in the middle of nowhere in the Milky Way galaxy, a mile marker for everyone who comes next. What is Keith without him? Space, the one thing Keith has wanted his whole life more than anything else, is irrevocably tainted. He used to dream of touching the stars, of pressing his bare, shaking hand to the solid ground of a place untouched by humanity, of picking it up and seeing the foreign dirt clinging to his skin. Something strange. Something amazing and beautiful.

But now he sees the stars and he wonders what it is like to die among them. Does it hurt? How far away does everyone you’ve ever loved feel?

How long before the life disappears from your glassy eyes?

 

-452

 

The story of the picture Keith keeps face down on his nightstand is this:

Shiro is, for some reason, going through a photography phase. But it’s not as if he actually _knows_ anything about real photography—lenses and apertures and depth of field, and other random technical words that mean things if you understand photography. Shiro just wants to take a lot of pictures on his phone, slap filters on them, and call it photography. Keith tells him this.

“If you think it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?” Shiro says, laughing as he hands Keith his phone. “Come on, take a picture. Bet it’s harder than you think.”

Keith takes three. He pretends to study a leaf on the ground for the first one, walking around it three times to search for the perfect angle until Shiro is doubled over laughing at his weird hunched over gait and serious face. The second is a carefully situated study of the bakery across the street—capturing the blue sky and clouds reflecting in the window and overlaid with the words PASTRIES • COFFEE • CAKES at the bottom. Keith hems and haws loudly over the filter choices—“Do you _really_ think Kelvin brings out the orange tones of the sidewalk too much, or is this fine? I love the fake distressed border so much.”

“Oh my god, shut up,” Shiro says laughing as he chases Keith down the street to get his phone back. “Come back here!”

The one advantage Keith has over Shiro is that he’s faster. He sprints an entire block, skidding to a stop on a corner and spinning around to watch Shiro catch up. Holding up the camera, Keith waits until Shiro is just starting to reach out and take it away, and then he snaps the final picture before his hand can close around the phone.

“You’re a little shit,” Shiro says, barely out of breath.

“Yes,” Keith says smugly. “How did I do?”

Shiro pulls up the leaf picture. “You stood in place for ten seconds to take this and it’s still blurry,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “Grade: F. The bakery one had potential until you ruined it with the worst filter you could get your grubby hands on.” Keith scoffs and shoves at Shiro’s shoulder in offense. Doesn’t think about how solid Shiro’s body feels and how he didn’t even sway away from Keith there.

“Sounds like I’m a fake photography prodigy after all,” Keith says with a dry mouth, busy eyeing Shiro’s biceps again. Why do they have to be so large and out in the summer sun all the time?

“All your pictures are terrible,” Shiro says, smiling.

“So’s yours. How’s the third one, then?”

Shiro flips to it and shrugs dismissively. “It’s just a shitty picture of me, I’ll delete it.”

“Let me see!” Keith makes a grab for the phone, but Shiro holds it over his head defensively. The look on his face is disgustingly self-satisfied.

“Really, asshole? Are you seriously making fun of my height? I’ll knee you in the fucking balls, I swear.”

“But can you even get your knee up that high?”

Keith makes his best attempt, but Shiro dodges to the side and grabs Keith so he can’t get to him. With a huff of breath, Keith finds himself crushed between Shiro’s chest and his forearm, too awkwardly balanced on his toes to get a knee anywhere sensitive, but that is so not important anymore. This close, Shiro smells like laundry detergent, aftershave, and just a little bit of sweat, and the combination is life destroying. Keith doesn’t want it to be too obvious that he’s sniffing Shiro like some sort of freak, but he doesn’t want it to be over too soon, so he fakes a bit of a struggle until Shiro’s free arm catches both his wrists and pins them behind Keith’s back.

Whoa.

“I give,” Keith eventually grumbles, forehead leaning against Shiro’s collarbone. He could tilt his head up and lick the line of Shiro’s neck, but that would be outside their normal interactions.

Shiro lets go of him. “Look, this picture is terrible though,” he says, finally relenting and letting Keith see.

“No, it’s—” sunshine, floppy hair, a wide, infectious smile “—I mean, you look good. It’s a nice picture. It’s candid.”

Actually, it stops Keith’s heart to see Shiro so happy. Two days later, he will steal Shiro’s phone again and send the picture to himself. Four months later, when Shiro is flying through the stars, Keith will get tired of scrolling through his phone to find it every time he wants to look at Shiro’s face and get it printed instead. It’s not quite like having Shiro on Earth, but it’s a sweet sight to see when Keith starts to miss him too much.

Now, he keeps the picture face down because Keith can’t bear to part with it, but he can’t wake up every morning and look at it either.

 

367

 

The desert sings to him of heat and longing. It taunts him with the sense memory of racing across the sand on the bike, plastered to Shiro’s back and shouting with terrified joy as Shiro did trick after trick just to get the adrenaline going.

When Keith opens his eyes and can’t see anything but the nape of Shiro’s neck surrounded by the desert, he stays in bed.

Just one step outside could be enough to break him completely.

 

4

 

His first night in the desert almost kills him. Keith isn’t aware enough to go anywhere resembling shelter—he drives the hoverbike until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer, then he parks under the moon and falls asleep in the sand. He nearly freezes to death, quaking in the fresh air like a newborn kitten.

It would be fitting. Romantic, even, in light of what will happen to Shiro’s body out there. But it’s not meant to be. He cries out all his tears, shaking in a ball on the ground with a thin blanket stolen from the Garrison draped over his body.

He’s dead, Keith thinks. He’s dead dead _dead_.

Keith feels like his personal North Star was just snuffed out of existence. Unceremoniously replaced in the procession of the equinoxes by a star more appropriately representing true north, but not nearly as bright or beautiful. He doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t _have_ anywhere to go, no more foster families to take him in or friends to let him crash on the couch. He is alone in the desert, the world, and now the whole goddamn universe.

 

368

 

i miss you. i miss you so fucking much but it doesn’t matter because i could write you a letter for every star in the night sky and you would still be gone.

i just want to hear your voice.

i just want to see you smile in front of me one more time.

you always told me to be patient. i don’t know how many more days i can be patient waiting for you. i know neither of us believe in god but if there’s a tiny chance that i can see you again one day then i believe and i want that day to be now.

it has been one year and three days since

i know you wouldn’t want me to come see you i know it isn’t what you want but i don’t know how to live without you.

i hate that you made me love you. you never could leave me alone you wanted to be my friend and i wanted to be yours and before long i didn’t know what friendship meant anymore because it was so much more than friendship.

why didn’t you let me say

you said you would be the first person who never left me and i know this isn’t your fault i don’t care what fucking iverson has to say about it. you are too damn good at what you do but i will never know what happened out there.

why did you have to leave? why did they have to put you on this mission i know you are brilliant but i wish this had been anyone except you and i would put myself in your place if i just knew you got to see one more sunrise

 

-125

 

“Keith—Keith, come on, _please_. Don’t do this.” Shiro’s eyes are begging, bright and soft with quiet desperation.

“What, you don’t want to have to deal with my feelings?” Keith says in a voice so cold he barely recognizes himself. “I thought you said you were my friend, I thought you told me I could tell you anything, even—“

“ _Keith_.”

The word stops Keith in his tracks. The crack in Shiro’s voice rings louder than any words he could use.

So gently, so, _so_ carefully, Shiro brushes his knuckles along the line of Keith’s jaw. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to admitting to themselves what this is.

“Please,” Shiro whispers. “I’ll be back in two years.”

So Keith swallows down the words he’ll always regret not saying, and standing alone in a deserted hallway, he watches Shiro walk away.

He doesn’t glance back.

 

369

 

Keith does not understand what the desert wants from him and why it won’t leave him alone. Sometimes he wonders if this is just him finally losing it. Humans aren’t meant to live as solitary creatures and Keith has done his best to speak to people as little as possible.

He doesn’t know how anymore.

But the desert is there for him, wrapping him up in warm sand and sunshine when he ventures out during the day. Sometimes when he looks at the sky and the color returns to his vision, he can almost appreciate how beautiful the world is. But the rest of the time, all the brightness and colors seem muted, as if they’re reflecting the sadness in his heart, shutting out the world in favor of the silence.

It has been one year and four days. Yesterday, or the day before, or maybe both days, Keith did not leave his bed, and he doesn’t remember the last time he ate. But today is a new day, a new dawn, and the desert urges him up.

It would be easier to live if the desert would just give up and let him rest, but it is ceaseless. It breaks past his best-guarded barriers and invites him to hope again, not for life found again but for the unbroken continuity of past and present that says there is more life beyond the barrier he cannot overcome within himself. This is not the end. _This is the turning point_ , it says _, and you don’t have_ _to martyr yourself in order to prove to the universe that you love him._

But when Keith steps outside the door to watch the sky bleed red as the world wakes up around him, he cannot make himself round the corner. He will not turn his back on Shiro; he will not admit that this is over.

Shiro can’t come home. Keith refuses to pretend home is anywhere else but by his side.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://disloyalpunk.tumblr.com)


End file.
